Douglas was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and grew up in
Hope, Arkansas, and
Alexandria, Louisiana. She graduated from the
University of Mississippi in 1942 and later settled in
Greenville, Mississippi with her husband Kenneth Haxton. She had three sons with Haxton: Richard, Ayres, and
Brooks Haxton, the latter a notable, award-winning poet and writer. Douglas taught writing at
Ole' Miss, where she was writer-in-residence from 1979 to 1983. She adopted the pen name Ellen Douglas before the publication of
A Family’s Affairs to protect the privacy of two aunts, on whose lives she had based much of the plot. Douglas died of heart failure at the age of 91 on November 7, 2012. Margalit Fox writes that Douglas's work "explored the epochal divide between the Old South and the New, examining vast, difficult subjects — race relations, tensions between the sexes, the conflict between the needs of the individual and those of the community — through the small, clear prism of domestic life." ==Selected bibliography==